Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @10:03PM
from the all-outta-gum dept.

andylim writes "It looks as if Duke Nukem isn't completely 'nuked' after all. Someone has ported the 90s classic on to a Nokia N900. As you'll see in the video, you control Duke using the Qwerty keypad and shoot using the touchscreen. I'm wondering how long it will take for this to get on other mobile platforms."
In other Duke news, reader Jupix points out that 3D Realms' CEO Scott Miller recently said, "There are numerous other Duke games in various stages of development, several due out this year. We are definitely looking to bring Duke into casual gaming spaces, plus there are other major Duke games in production."

I'd be tickled pink to see a sequeal of DN3D, even if it isn't the legendary DNF, but "just another " Duke Nukem game. Save the legendary title for something else, find a decent 3D engine, and allow us cool places to read the daily newspaper again.

After saving the world, Duke becomes castrated in an unhappy marriage to Samus Aran and is forced to drift from bar to bar giving strippers handsome tips. The ability to drink beers and become intoxicated was borrowed from Deus Ex for a more realistic experience.

Uuum, that’s an actual place in the game. If you killed the dancers, they bursted into a cloud of money, like piñatas. The normal routine was, to go to the bathroom, look at the mirror, tell yourself “Damn. I’m looking *good*!”, take a piss, then go out, pay her a few bills, then shoot everyone, take the loads of money, and run. ^^

Sadly, when I tried the same in GTA, some years later, I had the military surrounding the building.:/

Uuum, that’s an actual place in the game. If you killed the dancers, they bursted into a cloud of money, like piñatas.

And then swarms of monsters appeared. Just to point out that the game did punish players for doing that.
Also, for anyone who hasn't played DN3D, the player doesn't have money. You can't pick up the money.

I just meant they player doesn't have any cash to purchase things with. You don't pick up any money, you have no use for money, so there's no gain from killing them. The cloud of money is useless, unlike GTA.

The ability to drink beers and become intoxicated was borrowed from Deus Ex for a more realistic experience.

You don't remember Rednack Rampage? That was one fun and funny game! It used liquor as a power up too, and predated Deus Ex by quite some time. And its liquor was more potent than beer. It used moonshine as one of its power ups, but if you drank too much of it, it was a power-down of sorts (a hilarious power down). Plus, Mojo Nixon, the only artist I've heard of that does Punk Country, with such memo

Well, meanwhile, you can relive Duke Nukem 3D in hi-res 3D glory with the Duke Nukem 3D: High Resolution Pack [duke4.net]. All the sprites have been replaced with 3D models and the textures replaced with hi-res textures - you get to play it in a modern Windows environment with hardware OpenGL acceleration too.

The key is having the humor that the last DN3D had, but updated for modern times. The "GUILTY?" signs, the white Bronco chase scene, and 867-5309 in the restroom were all touches that set that game apart from the scads of FPS games that followed.

It is now more important than ever to distinguish between 'Linux' the kernel and 'Linux' the unix-like complete system. Just a friendly reminder for when you go looking - most devices on that page are not what the name implies.

Deep, deep down, the iPhone runs a heavily modified BSD. Android is based on Linux, but Maemo (on the N900) is a real, full-fledged Linux distro (Debian based). If you can get it working on Ubuntu, you've got a good chance of getting it working on the N900.

It's easily the coolest smart phone out there, but I still hope we're not going to see a new slashdot article for every Linux application that also happens to work on Maemo.

By the way, "phone" really doesn't do the current generation of high-end smartphon

It has been ported to Windows CE (aka Windows Mobile) for years now. And some quick googling revealed that a previous Symbian port is readily available on the 'nets and has been for several years now (http://duke-nukem-3d.en.softonic.com/symbian), along with Palm and Blackberry counterparts. The game has also made its way to just about every games console since the PS1. I fail to see why this article is in any way news.

Oh, the OpenMoko can make phone calls, alright... you just have to wait 30 seconds after the other end has picked up until you can start talking. Picking up an incoming call is fun too - Press the button, wait 20 seconds, "Hi!".

That was a bit of a shock for me, even coming from a stone-aged WM5.0 phone...

I'm a bit surprised that it's news too. I played Doom on my Nokia 770 years ago - it was one of the first games to be ported - and I thought Duke3D was ported quite shortly after. Several other contemporary FPS games were ported back around 2006/7. Duke ran well in 800x600 on a 133MHz Pentium, so the 250MHz OMAP2 in the 770 ought to be fast enough to run it in 640x480 (not sure if the engine supports 800x480). The N900 is massively overpowered for such a game - it should be able to run Quake 3 pretty we

Not sure I understand the big deal over this. I often wonder what it will be like twenty years from now. We will be writing about how Halo (or insert other game of this time frame) has been ported over to the latest and greatest device. Are we celebrating programming excellence or are we celebrating that a dead IP is still kicking around?

1: The source code to Halo was not open sourced, the source code to Duke Nukem 3D was.
2: What was so special about Halo compared to Duke Nukem 3D?
3: Doom is almost 20 years old (it's 16, actually), and people still play it (offline and online). People still make maps/mods for it. Will people do THAT for the games of today? I highly doubt that.

What set Duke apart was the humour. The game didn't take itself seriously, which made it fun to play. It also abused the engine to produce levels that didn't fit in 3D space, which made for a few fun environments.

What was so special about Duke Nukem 3D compared to Doom, Quake, or 3D Realms' own Rise of the Triad?

The humor, the environment, the subtle digs at authority. The first level in DN3D is very memorable, starting out on a roof with Duke muttering about those aliens destroying his ride. Followed up almost immediately by pig cops flying around on hover bikes.

At the time there was a fair amount of interaction with the environment as well. Lots of destructible props scattered around.

Does anyone else just grimace when they see "Duke Nukem"-anything related news anymore? I was 7 when Duke Nukem 3d came out

Gees, but you make me feel old! You're younger than my youngest daughter. You weren't even born when I first played the first Duke Nukem, a 2D side scroller that came out iirc in the late eighties. To geezers like me who bought all three of them when they were new, any rumor of new Nukem IS news, and welcome news at that.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the N900 basically run Linux? I believe that Duke 3D is old enough that it runs very well under something like dosemu , doesn't it? I mean, wasn't Duke 3D one of the last games to use a pure software renderer instead of hardware accelleration?

It does run well on DOSBox, and was indeed software-only. The only sort of "acceleration" it offered was the option to use VESA BIOS 2.0 video modes.

FWIW I can run it on hardware with my Pentium-90 DOS game box & its Voodoo3 at 800x600x8 (its maximum) with acceptable framerates. It's not quite this fast in DOSBox on my C2D E6300 machine, but that's what lower resolutions are for.

Duke 3D was open sourced under the GPL in 2003. A few ports were created, some adding 3D OpenGL acceleration for multiple operating systems. The best one I tried is JFDuke3D. Its author was supported by Ken Silverman who is the developer of the Build Engine which Duke3D was built on. I installed Duke 3D from my original CD under dos box and then copied the game files to a new directory and installed JFduke3D. Works great and gives you true 3D OpenGL rendering and mouse looking.

...with even a half-decent controller for action games? Something that lets you aim and fire quickly? It's not a major priority for me, but it seems like it's a shame to have these phones that can run, say, the UT3 engine, but are inferior to a gameboy in actual play. Android in particular seems like a natural fit (it's well established that apple people can't handle more than one physical button, tee hee).

Jeez I see duke nukem on a/. headline and think "WHAT!" don't tease me anymore. Then I realize it is for some stupid phone and some game that I played many years ago, not going to do it again.
Piss of Duke, I am done with you.

You should have just gotten new one using warranty. Since droid seems to get the same sort of bug [motorola.com], it is quite possible there is simply a bad batch of omap 3 processors going around.

My N900 has been very stable. I've had it for over 5 weeks now and I've so far gotten a single reboot. That was when I was trying to open unsupported file with development version of KMplayer. Even then the phone just autobooted and everything was back to normal.

The biggest problem with old games on mobiles is definitely the controls. If you have seen Duke Nukem 3D on iPhone you would have to agree the controls make it nearly unplayable. I remember playing through couple of levels on my N810 and the keyboard makes it more playable but it can still be tiresome experience for your fingers. Connecting Wiimote to N900 gives good controls but the Wiimote is too big to carry around.

On positive side, porting games like these to n900 is pretty easy. So far I've seen Star Control 2, Quake 3, Jagged Alliance 2, Duke 3D and Shadow Warrior. All were ported by someone for free. If you connect Wiimote to N900 and N900 to your TV, it's almost as good as cheap console.

"There are numerous other Duke games in various stages of development, several due out this year. We are definitely looking to bring Duke into casual gaming spaces, plus there are other major Duke games in production."

So that's multiple major Duke games plus several smaller ones with more than one due out in 2010?!

Hillarious! It's like when you ask your friend starting a business on their own how that are doing and they'll say something like "Oh yeah doing great! Got a few things on the burner, with a coupl

In other Duke news, reader Jupix points out that 3D Realms' CEO Scott Miller recently said, "There are numerous other Duke games in various stages of development, several due out this year. We are definitely looking to bring Duke into casual gaming spaces, plus there are other major Duke games in production."